In the modern media world, both in-home and out-of-home media is becoming more advanced as it becomes based more on digital signage (e.g., video displays) and web-based ads that are replacing traditional static billboards. However, these video displays, also known as digital video billboards, suffer from the problem that their static billboard predecessors did: they are not interactive.
Making signs interactive has been pursued before, but has largely been a failure due to inherent deficiencies in the designs of previous systems. Previous systems have relied on software downloads to a mobile device, which requires that the devices be capable of downloading and running third party software. Some mobile devices, such as inexpensive cell phones for example, simply don't have such capability. Other mobile devices, such as higher-end cell phones and smart phones which do have such capability, still require a version of the third party software that is customized for that device. And, since there are hundreds of varieties of mobile devices that are constantly changing, the task of writing the software for each one is a never-ending task. Another requirement of previous systems has been Bluetooth® or IEEE 802.11 (Wi-Fi) compatibility to provide a communications channel that can be used to transmit data. Again, many mobile devices do not have these capabilities and are therefore unable to interact with the prior art systems.
One prior art system, described in U.S. Pat. No. 7,450,954, titled “System and Method for Location-based Interactive Content,” allows users who are viewing a display screen in a public location to send SMS messages and voice messages from cell phones to a centralized content server. A plurality of “location-based displays” with unique identifiers (e.g., telephone numbers or SMS short codes) are connected to the content server and each is controlled by a dedicated communications management console in the content server including hardware and software that records a user's inputs and modifies a corresponding digital display in response. This system also includes a content management module in the content server that creates content for each display screen. One significant disadvantage of this system is that the load placed on the centralized content server is enormous, making scaling and load-balancing very difficult as the number of users and the number of displays increases. Another disadvantage of this system is that it requires, at the least, SMS capability in the mobile devices. Older cell phones may not be SMS capable. Additionally, some users may not know how to send SMS messages even if their mobile devices have the capability.
Another prior art system, described in International Publication WO2004/004857, titled “System and Method for Playing an Interactive Game Using a Mobile Device,” provides a centralized game server that allows mobile device users to play coordinated games on a game display. This system suffers from one of the disadvantages described above. It does not scale easily because the centralized server is burdened with all of the tasks of managing transmissions to and from the mobile devices, running the game software and managing the game display.
Yet another prior art system, described in International Publication WO2006/052837, titled “A system and Method for Interactive Marketing,” uses a proxy gateway to connect mobile device users to an interactive display by connecting two dissimilar networks. This system requires dedicated software (a content manager and a client location tagger) to run on a computer local to the interactive display.
All of the systems described above are also limited to the control of interactive displays and do not address the control of other digital devices or interactive systems. FIG. 1 illustrates the general configuration of these prior art systems, where the interaction between a user's device and a local display is managed over a network by a remote content server.